The Obama administration has pressured landlords, banks and credit card companies to cut off services to medical marijuana dispensaries. Now the administration may have found a new target: armored car companies that carry cash for the pot clubs.

The executive director of Oakland's huge Harborside Health Center, already fighting a federal eviction suit, has used armored cars to pay tax collectors and other creditors because he can no longer use checks or credit cards. On Wednesday, he said, the armored car company told him it was terminating service on the orders of an unnamed federal agency.

"We don't have any written document that the DEA has actually sent to the (armored car) companies. We know that the services have stopped" for most Colorado dispensaries, said Steve Fox, the cannabis association's director of government relations.

Threat of action

He said dispensary operators have reported that the DEA has warned armored car companies it would take legal action, with the implied threat of prosecution for criminal conspiracy, if they continued to transport funds for marijuana suppliers.

Steve D'Angelo, executive director of Harborside, the nation's largest medical marijuana dispensary, said his armored car provider told him only that "they had been contacted by a federal agency and had been told they should no longer provide service to us."

He said he knows of one other Bay Area dispensary that had a similar experience, and believes it's happening throughout California.

"It's a potentially crippling tactic, and of course that's why they're doing it," D'Angelo said. He said Harborside is "scrambling" to find other ways to deliver cash to major creditors.

There was no comment from the transportation company, Dunbar Armored.

Karl Nichols, spokesman for the DEA's San Francisco field office, said he knows of no organized effort by the agency to contact armored car companies and order or advise them to steer clear of marijuana dispensaries. But he said the DEA, if contacted by a company, will point out "the hazards of doing business ... with a business that's violating the (federal drug) law."

Those hazards, he said, include possible prosecution for money-laundering or violating banking laws, because armored cars that handle large transactions are covered by bank regulations. Some DEA offices may have contacted armored car companies to convey such a message, Nichols said, but "as far as I know, it hasn't been done in the San Francisco area."

Opening a new front

Armored cars represent a new front in the campaign against pot dispensaries by an administration that, after taking office in 2009, said it would defer to states' laws on medical marijuana.

Citing statements by federal regulators, many banks and credit card companies have stopped doing business with dispensaries. The Internal Revenue Service has told some dispensaries, including Harborside, that they can no longer deduct employee pay and operating costs from their taxable income.

Several hundred California dispensaries have closed after federal prosecutors told their landlords, starting in October 2011, to evict them or face loss of their property. Harborside, backed by the city of Oakland, is contesting eviction and could go to trial next year.

In the meantime, D'Angelo said, the dispensary has to handle its cash on-site after federal action against its bank accounts and credit cards.

"Now," he said, "they have denied us any secure way to transport that cash to those whom we owe money."